Going Places: François Roche and Pierre Huyghe’s Train to Nowhere

Performance art might be a thrill, but the new frontier in ultra-exclusive ephemeral happenings transports the viewer — quite literally.

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A naked actor playing a role for a small audience that had traveled by train into the Swiss Alps to view an art event shrouded in secrecy.Credit Aurélien Chauvaud

IN LATE FEBRUARY, a group of art collectors, curators and financiers gathered on a train platform in St. Moritz, the moneyed resort town in the Swiss Alps. They were there to see some art, but they weren’t told what kind of art it would be. The invitation to “What Could Happen,” a project by the elusive French architect François Roche and his partner Camille Lacadee in collaboration with the artist Pierre Huyghe, promised an “experimental expedition” to a frozen lake on a vintage 1910 train. All other details were kept secret and even those with intimate knowledge of what would happen struggled to describe it.

Michèle Lamy, the wife of the designer Rick Owens, had volunteered to provide food for the trip. She suggested calling it a journey. “A ‘performance’ has a different sense in French,” she explained. “And ‘happening’ makes it sound back in time.”

“But it’s so much more than an expedition,” said Maja Hoffmann, an art philanthropist and the event’s chief sponsor. “It’s really a voyage into another dimension.”

Or as Lacadee, Roche’s beautiful, stoic collaborator, put it, “It’s called ‘What Could Happen’ — so that’s what you call it . . . you will understand what is happening once it happens.”

As peculiar as this sounded, Roche and Lacadee aren’t the first to abduct the art crowd on a mysterious excursion. The latest in a recent wave of transient art pieces, “What Could Happen” called to mind Doug Aitken’s 2013 “Station to Station” project, which had the artist sending a “kinetic-light-sculpture” train rolling cross-country, staging performances by various artists along the way, and Matthew Barney’s “River of Fundament,” a film project for which the artist invited an audience on a barge ride down the Detroit River and entertained them by dredging a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial out of the water. As microproductions with their own actors and directors, these happenings expand on a genre known as relational art, which turns viewers into an integral part of the work, and often leaves nothing behind but the memory of the experience. And yet art excursions take that idea one step further. They’re not just fleeting in a temporal sense — they’re literally on the move.

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Dreamed up by the French architect François Roche, the trip began in St. Moritz, a resort town in the Swiss Alps.Credit Aurélien Chauvaud

Roche had been invited to do a project in the area by Giorgio Pace, a St. Moritz-based curator, who’d discovered the architect’s work through Engadin Art Talks, a lecture series organized by Hans Ulrich Obrist. (Obrist, who spent his youth discovering art by riding trains through Europe, has arguably become the art world’s most peripatetic curator.) Roche agreed on one condition: “I said, I would love to do something very high and very inaccessible.” He proposed finding a remote lake and flying people in on helicopters. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, this guy is crazy,’ ” Pace recalled. “You cannot land on a lake!”

Pace, a sprightly, resourceful 48-year-old whose résumé includes stints at the Venice Biennale and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, eventually found the Lej Nair (“Black Lake”), which is situated near the Diavolezza glacier and, more importantly, near train tracks. Seats on the train were by invitation only, which went out to a select group of some 300 people who had the means and the time to travel to the Alps for art they knew nothing about and which they couldn’t even buy. If the art market habitually placed the artist at the whim of the collector, here the collector was suddenly at the whim of the artist. “They cannot just cross the room as in a museum,” Roche observed of his captive passengers. “They are trapped.”

Roche, a slightly unkempt 54-year-old, wore black ski pants, a puffer jacket and sunglasses. He had requested that everyone wear dark colors, but Pace arrived at the station in a light blue turtleneck and a long cape. “I was so sleepy this morning that I forgot, but I have my cape like this,” he said, and wrapped himself in the garment. The architect Norman Foster, a part-time St. Moritz resident, seemed to have forgotten too, and was dressed in white corduroys and a cream turtleneck. Another conspicuous presence was Lamy, who had spent the morning assembling boxed lunches with food by the Swiss chef Andreas Caminada. (Lamy used to operate Les Deux Cafés in Los Angeles.) Easily recognizable by her diamond-studded teeth, Lamy wore a coat made up of brown and black tentacles that looked like a small animal had wrapped itself around her torso.

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Among the hand-picked passengers, the British architect Norman Foster.Credit Aurélien Chauvaud

After everyone boarded the small, three-wagon train, Lacadee issued what sounded like stage directions for an improv class: “You’re all passengers going to the sanatorium and your only subject of discussion will be your own disease, physical or psychological.” On board were two hired actors, Véronique Mermoud and Matthieu Kobilinsky. Roche said Kobilinsky would be playing “an old teenager in the castration clamp of his mother” and that today was “the day of his weaning.”

As one of the few architects to emerge in the interactive art movement, Roche creates not buildings exactly, but scientific experiments. In the past, he has erected a structure in Thailand that used a water buffalo as a power generator; built a parking garage in Japan with undulating asphalt so that each car appeared suspended in motion; and constructed a private residence in Nimes, France, with an intricate exterior of netting and trees that made it impossible for anyone to find the house, let alone photograph it. Roche himself has long tried to prevent the publication of his own image. (“It’s like Margiela, or Daft Punk,” he told me. “It’s something from the ’90s where we try not to be pop stars but to be anonymous.”)

The view outside turned from dense forest to rolling, snow-covered landscapes. Roche passed around a small glass sculpture the size of a paperweight, created by Huyghe, a longtime collaborator whose recent retrospective at Los Angeles County Museum of Art was described by one art website as a “relational aesthetics theme park.” Roche introduced the object as the “MacGuffin” and handed it off to the actors, who recited lines in French while Roche filmed them. Everyone else was supposed to be discussing their diseases, but mostly they snacked on the foie gras lollipops that Lamy had packed for them in leather Rick Owens totes. Eventually, a blue and orange structure came into view. “Is that it?” someone asked. But as the train drew closer, it turned out to be a Red Bull tent left over from a ski competition. Appreciating the humor in this, everyone erupted in compliments for the Red Bull tent.

“Ah, magnifico!”

“So chic!”

“Beautiful!”

A moment later, we came to the real thing: a large-scale reproduction of the MacGuffin, installed in the middle of the Lej Nair. For a few seconds no one was quite sure what to look for. Then Kobilinsky appeared out in the snow. He was completely naked and he was walking toward the structure. It was a wild sight. Not just the naked man staggering through a wide expanse of snowy nothingness, but the group of esteemed collectors crowding the windows like eager schoolchildren. When Kobilinsky reached the crystal igloo and began to crawl inside, agonizing screams started emanating from somewhere outside the train. (Vermoud was providing the sound effects.) And then Kobilinsky was inside and the wailing stopped. And that was it. The train began to pull away.

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The trip to a frozen lake culminated in a performance involving nudity and biodegradable architecture, all of which were filmed for a piece to be shown at the Luma Foundation in Zurich.Credit Aurélien Chauvaud

Afterward, some wondered if the idea had been that the structure had consumed Kobilinsky or that he had committed suicide. Others asked if we were still going to the sanatorium. (We weren’t.) Most inquired how long poor Kobilinsky was to remain on the lake. (He would keep warm under heated blankets until someone could go pick him up.)

On the way back, Roche employed a dizzying array of references to explain the work, from the myth of the Diavolezza glacier, which involves a she-devil who used to lure male hunters to their death, to Thomas Mann’s “Tristan,” to Dignitas, the assisted-suicide clinic in Zurich and climate change. The structure itself was made out of biodegradable plastic. “It was supposed to dissolve,” he said, “but the Swiss refuse the dissolving so now we will take it back.”

Pace had floated the idea of installing it at the International Contemporary Art Fair in Paris, but Roche insisted the work could never be sold or reproduced. “It is impossible for me,” he said. For Roche, to make the exhibit static in some way was to destroy it. “It’s an odyssey,” he said. “I love architecture as odyssey. It’s forcing the architect to go away from the technology of his studio where everything is warm and comfortable and through the difficulties to discover what we can do.” Then he added, without a trace of a smile, “The next one will be on the moon.”

A version of this article appears in print on 05/17/2015, on page M2124 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Going Places.